You mean, other than when it does happen. Which it already does, and has many times. Other than that, right?
Have you checked in on Enron lately? Or the huge, publicly-traded accounting firm that helped them muddy the financial waters? The death penalty was applied to both, and swiftly.
They produce safe places to put money, and they produce all sorts of banking products that allow things like businesses to run their financial operations every day (check processing, merchant services, reports, legal services, etc), and they produce hugely expensive, elaborate networks of ATMs, credit card processing, wire transfer services, direct deposit systems, etc.
Try running a business without having someone producing and providing those systems to you, and then re-ask your question.
Presumably you feel the same way about CNN, BBC, Reuters, the API, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, the NYT, Scientific American, and pretty much every single "news" blog connected to the internet? No? Then you're a big ol' hypocrite.
Re:Favorite Prank of All Time?
on
Ask The Yes Men
·
· Score: 1
Andy Kaufman was a prank?
Wow, his parents were dedicated!
Did you notice how young he died? He was just a project. A skinjob. A Nexus-6 "Satire" model. A built-in short, but funny life.
Re:Do You Draw a Line at Who You Prank?
on
Ask The Yes Men
·
· Score: 1
Do You Draw a Line at Who You Prank?
Well, they do come right out on their web site and make it clear that they are about helping "progressives" (their choice of agenda-identifcation, not mine). That should narrow it down a bit. Now, I think that progressives could indeed by helped by a dose of introspection-inducing public ridicule, just as they have many full-time professionals within their ranks dishing out to others. So perhaps that's within their scope, here, pointed the other way. Or maybe the Hobbit business was just meant to be disarming, to buy uncriticized wiggle-room for their more aggressively targeted marks outside the progressive-sphere.
What were you expecting, an announcement that said, "Alert: We have no idea what to tell you to do, since we have no idea what just happened or what will happen next, who is involved, or the scope of the situation!" ?
Or perhaps: "Alert! Complex conflict with Jihaddist Wackadoos now coming to a head, since they're supporting and harboring the people who launched this attack! We can't tell you a thing to do except watch the news, because it's not the sort of emergency that lends itself to any specific instructions other than to avoid the Pentagon parking lot and Lower Manhattan, not that you could get near them anyway right now."
9/11 wasn't the least sort of situation that the EAS is meant to handle.It's meant to break into something you're already watching, and to pass along specific information. On 9/11, pretty much everything you were already watching was already diverted to news coverage, in real time.
You're missing the point. Conservatves aren't afraid to say that they start and run businesses in order to make money. They're proud of creating prosperity. The lefties, on the other hand, do the same stuff, but piously avoid talking about it, and look for cover under the auspicies of the sort of malarky that Gore dishes out. In that camp, it's not cool to want to create wealth. It's only cool to pander to people who fail to grasp that the prosperity pie is not of a fixed size, and to do what those ignoramouses want: let someone else create prosperity, and then use the excuse that they are Eeeeevil for having done so, and then take it away, to temporarily have for themselves, until it runs out and they have to go looking for someone else to villify and loot.
The it's-all-and-only-AGW crowd figures that they've found the magic all-purpose cover mechanism, since they know it will take decades for people to figure out that all of the breathless hyperbole was far more BS than anything else.
The complaint, here, is about people who won't say "Yay! Free market!" out loud, but who then try to create nonsense markets (see: Gore, carbon funny-money, etc) in order to do exactly the same while playing St. Green Guy to avoid criticism from those who hate extremely rich people (like Gore, Moore, et al). Conservatives who point out the Faux-Green-Huckster cash grab aren't being hypocritical, they're pointing out hypocrisy on a grand scale. It was sleazy when the Catholic Church sold get-into-heaven indulgences, and it's sleazy when Al Gore does the modern equivalent, using hurricane-emitting-smokestacks as his modern version of Hieronymus Bosch paintings.
You're (deliberately, one has to assume) pretending to completely miss the point. Who cares how much money construction or fuel companies make? Al Gore is out to make his own money and to enrich his investors (you know, those Eeeeevil 1% people who have money invest in things, and got that way by investing in things). The only thing that matters to him is that his hyperbolic bluster about the end of civilization coming if we don't immediately start to trade phony carbon credits through his shell companies or favor trade with the companies he's got his own money in, and which he's used to talk Democrats into lending taxpayers' cash to questionable crony companies, works. For him. Period.
The only thing left to argue about is how much do we contribute... 80%? 50%?
Really? That's how little you understand the big picture? And you really think that if the number is 10%, or 50%, or 90% it makes no difference?
Regardless, the "denialists" you're loving to hate actually do want to know the number, because people like Al Gore and his large AGW money-handling machine say that human activity is the cause of climate change. Period. And people like him propose the re-arranging of trillions of dollars and government growth in power and intrusiveness (in a way that, gosh, just happens to line up nicely with what generally lefty activists and politicians have always wanted to have happen - how convenient!) as the cure for the 100% AGW that they're preaching.
You think there's nothing left but to settle on a number, just for sake of having it written down someplace? The people who want to cripple economies (just some economies, of course, but not poor, third-world, developing economies like China's) to atone for what they say is 100% man-made, are the people you should be keeping an eye on. They are in it for one thing only, which is why they set up all sorts of money-making entities poised to capitalize on politicians' urges to be seen "doing something." Something, of course, that - mysteriously - never seems to touch on the actual issue (too many people feverishly reproducing in places where they still do things like scrape rainforests down to the ground to get one season's wood and cowpasture, and build a new coal-fired power plant every week to keep up with population growth).
The people you sniffingly dismiss on this topic are looking at what other people, who claimed years ago to have this entirely figured out, numbers and causality and degree be damned, and who want to leverage the situation to get the cash and power. No surprise. Pictures of hurricanes coming out of smokestacks have obviously worked on you.
You should really consider a different way to try to explain away stuff that's documented by all sorts of people. Which part is it that you think is fabricated, exactly, or incorrect? I see.
The most frequently posted opinions on slashdot are far to the right of 99% of the world.
Other than the fact that that's just obvioulsy wrong on the face of it, the real issue is that lefty people who don't like to come right out and say what they think (that productive, creative people should be slaves to people who are not or don't want to bother being so) don't make substantive comments here because those comments are so easily refuted. Instead, they just down-mod what they consider to be too-conservative or libertarian-minded comments, and trot out completely BS statisics in an attempt to persuade non-critical-thinking products of the Nanny State to give them their tepid moral support.
Zombies don't defecate on police cars, or store propane, serve food (but not to poor people!) on property where they don't even have a permit to hold the large assemblies that any other group would be fined for holding.
Also, Zombies have a coherent, identifiable purpose beyond simply whining when the cameras show up, if they're not too busy enforcing their own "no-snitch" rules while having under-age girls and drugs in their tents.
What you are (deliberately, because there's no other possible explanation) missing is that even if 90% of scientists say they think that there is such a thing as AGW, they are not all saying - unlike Al Gore and his merry band of hucksters, investors, and money-handlers - that it (AGW) is the only thing impacting climate, or even necessarily a prominent factor, or anything that can be actually altered by the sort of tax-related and redistributionist agenda that so many preach as a solution. You are (deliberately) pretending that the consensus you cite is a consensus on topics about which 90% of scientists sure as hell do not agree or even responsibly offer an opinion.
Your own post shows how much you think of this topic in idealogical and political power terms, rather than in scientific terms. Which is what this topic - in any way that really matters - is actually all about for the leftists that have latched onto it as one of their favorite new bang-the-drums-in-the-street distraction theater topics. Grabbing cash, power, and political leverage to support the goals of the people we see lining up behind the it's-all-AGW and AGW-is-all-from-Eeeeeevil-businesses mantra, that's what's on display here. And you're doing your assignment just as you've been taught.
Until the consequences reach such catastrophic, region-depopulating proportions that the changes
You mean, like the catastrophic, region-depopulating events, shifts, trends, changes, and whatnot that have happened for millions of years, and which have certainly happened in very obvious ways over the last few thousands of years without any modern-flavored emissions to complicate matters? That sort of thing? We don't need to wait for that to happen, it has happened countless times before, in spots big and small and huge all over the world. It will continue to happen even after the people stomping their feet and insiting that only human activity impacts the climate have died and been replaced by their hopefully more sensible decendents.
By then it'll almost certainly be too late to do anything
Yes, just as it's much too late to do anything about the Sahara, which used to be lush and green and supported populations that it no longer does, and which it ceased to do long before anyone drove an SUV full of people to a protest march or a soccer game.
What you're suggesting is mathematically impossible for anymore than 1% of the population.
So what? The whiny people who keep trotting out that phrase aren't actually talking about "1%" of the population anyway. It's code for "people who've made more than I have, and who I therefore resent." If they got their wish and did topple the Eeeeeevil Businesses and all of the people who've created them, invested in them, and made money in transacting sales of shares of those businesses as more people (um, like labor union pension funds) seek to also own a part of them, then... great. Those really wealthy people would be gone, right? And then there would be a new 1% to hate, envy, and destroy.
The people marching to that "99%" rubbish are just using code words. So when someone says to them, "just be 1% yourself," they mean exactly what you know they mean: do the things that successful people do so you can quit resenting them for having the discipline, attracting investment, and all of the other things that you don't have to be a member of an Eeeeeeevil Sercret Society to do. It's not about 1% or 5%. The only % that really matters are the 50% of people in this country that don't even pay incometaxes, but who are screaming about other people needing to "pay their fair share." The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren't so toxic.
a few people that had their businesses yanked out of under them because the bank wanted their money back before term
Which is a direct breach of a contract, and a slam dunk in court. But of course it's not because you're either simply BS-ing to score points, or you're deliberately not telling the whole story, and you know it.
So what you're saying is that the middle class is "waging war" against poor people? That poor people remain poor because the middle class is taking their money?
You keep saying "99%," but I don't think you're actually able to do math. Which may explain much of your perspective, actually.
Regardless, why aren't you complaining about the wildly more than 1% of the population that actually owns the large companies about which you're complaining? Why aren't you complaining about your 100% of fellow voters who are the sole source of political power in countries that actually have constitutionally governed elections?
The Arab Spring you're praising appears to be a pretty grim affair indeed. Places like Tunisia are using the changed circumstances to put medieval-minded Islamists into power. The people now running Lybia are assuring us all that Sharia Law will govern everyone's lives in that country. Yay! Is that the 99% you support everywhere? Really? Do you even know what it is you're praising?
I was particularly amused to read about the "occupy" people in NYC whose cooks/chefs are going on strike (and only served a course of peanut butter sandwiches for one meal) to protest against the crowd of people there eating their food without being sufficiently in lock-step with their undefineable agenda. Down With The Man! The Little Guy Should Have Everything! Um, Except For You, Mister, No Food For You Until You Say What We Tell You To Say!
Your 99% is every bit as stratified internally as is the larger world that they're whining about. They're enforcing "no snitch" rules in their mobs and frantically spin-managing reporters in order to pretend it's not so, but the moral hollowness of their whole rudderless rant is staring to really show through, now that most of the well-meaning, rational people have realized what silliness it all is, and have gone home.
Arab protests didn't "embolden" airline workers. Transportation industry workers are famous for striking, do it all the time, and are frequently tone-deaf, even after all these years, about how their actions are received. This isn't any more "new" than are unfocused groups of professional/slacker protesters banging drums in the street and complaining about the inadequacy of the Nanny State. It's the usual group of people, saying the usual internally-contradictory and short-sighted things, with the usual expected result of making people who actually create the jobs these idiots are "demanding" roll their eyes and shake their heads. As most people are doing.
But what were the Mayans saying about how this would impact the global confusion over the difference between itsand it's? Will that finally get straightened out? It might be worth having the universe end if it would put an end to that problem. That, and the end of people using loose when they mean lose. I'm all for the apocalypse if I never again have to read a forum thread in which theoretically academic people talk about how the wrong sort of science and public relations can cause a program to loose it's funding.
Really? You're so obsessed with him that despite everything else going on the world, and billions of poeple about whom you could make some joke, you see a story like this, and the first thing you do is go digging through your one-track, Bush-hatred mind and give this a go? Really?
You can relax. He's not running for president. The guy who thinks there are such things as transcontinental railroads, 57 US states, and similar things (which, if W had said them, would have sent you into a shuddering orgasm of Bush Derangement Syndrome poison-spouting), is running for re-election, though. Why not update your lame repertoire? 2012 is almost here. Maybe you could try on some racist Cain jokes, or fixate on Romney's hair in order to show how cool you are.
do people like you *really* misunderstand the situation this badly
No, I've got it just fine. People chanting about toppling businesses, tearing down banks, doing away with capital and investment as a way to launch and finance businesses, stamping their feet and defecating on police cars while complaining that rich people (who pay almost all of the country's income taxes, and who if taxed at 100% of their income would barely put a dent in the budget deficit) aren't paying their "fair share"... all of that crap is coming through loud and clear - it's impossible to miss.
What I'm hearing is greed. Greed to have more stuff, taken from the minority of the people who actually pay income taxes, and given out by the government to the majority, who pay little or (in the case of roughly 50% of the population) pay no income taxes at all. What's that about "fair share?"
The latest greed from that camp is the fad for demanding that some clown's $150,000 debt for going to Harvard should be paid for by everyone but him, including a piece of every day's work (in the form of taxes) taken from a guy who understood basic math and opted to take advantage of his local community college, instead, and save six figures in absurd expenses.
I'm seeing greed in the form of demands for "social justice" in the form of everyone getting the same stuff, whether or not they bother to work, and whether or not they have the drive to work two, or three jobs, or risk everything to start a business. Pure greed, born of an enttitlement mindset, and just as doomed to fail as every other urge in that direction has failed everywhere it is applied as policy.
You don't like the fact that the Obama administration hasn't managed to find some basis for criminal prosecution of what you clearly understand to be plain-as-day-details of crimes on the part of some particular investment bankkers? They why aren't you calling for protests in front of the White House, or in front of the offices of the congressional representatives and senators that give that administration their support?
Or, we could sit back and wait for the Chinese to do the innovation and use their manufacturing prowess to sell us cheap electric cars.
Which is exactly how it turned out with solar panels, except the Obama administration put half a billion tax dollars on a bonfire in the Solyndra parking lots so we could be warm while we watched it happen. Of course, they rigged that financing situation so that a handful of private investors would get paid back before the taxpayers... private investors who happened to be friends of and fundraisers for the Obama campaign. Classy, huh?
Let private companies attract private fundraising for this sort of thing. And let only those people lose out if it's a waste. And if it's successful, let them be rich for having been smart about it (though being smart, and reaping those rewards is now an Eeeeeevil 1% thing to do - and we can't have that now, can we).
No. Taxpayer money was put at risk for the benefit of a company in Finland. If the product and the company were plainly viable, there would be far more than the half billion dollars in US tax money racing to them from private investors all over the world.
This is an Obama administration fashion statement for rich lefties, and an ass-kiss aimed at socialist Scandinavia so they'll say one or two less sneering things about the US once in a while. The car is more or less pointless, the price tag is absurd, the impact on the economy is inconsequential, but the overall pattern is very telling.
I look at the relative stability of Libya before and with Gaddafi
That would be the same stable Libya in which they're finding mass graves full of people he killed off in order to keep down any challenges to his rule? The stability he said he was going to maintain by slaughtering eveyone in several villages/towns/cities because the people resisting him had managed to move into and through those places? Your idea of stability is pretty toxic.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why it will never happen.
You mean, other than when it does happen. Which it already does, and has many times. Other than that, right?
Have you checked in on Enron lately? Or the huge, publicly-traded accounting firm that helped them muddy the financial waters? The death penalty was applied to both, and swiftly.
What does the banking "industry" produce?
They produce safe places to put money, and they produce all sorts of banking products that allow things like businesses to run their financial operations every day (check processing, merchant services, reports, legal services, etc), and they produce hugely expensive, elaborate networks of ATMs, credit card processing, wire transfer services, direct deposit systems, etc.
Try running a business without having someone producing and providing those systems to you, and then re-ask your question.
Presumably you feel the same way about CNN, BBC, Reuters, the API, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, the NYT, Scientific American, and pretty much every single "news" blog connected to the internet? No? Then you're a big ol' hypocrite.
Andy Kaufman was a prank?
Wow, his parents were dedicated!
Did you notice how young he died? He was just a project. A skinjob. A Nexus-6 "Satire" model. A built-in short, but funny life.
Do You Draw a Line at Who You Prank?
Well, they do come right out on their web site and make it clear that they are about helping "progressives" (their choice of agenda-identifcation, not mine). That should narrow it down a bit. Now, I think that progressives could indeed by helped by a dose of introspection-inducing public ridicule, just as they have many full-time professionals within their ranks dishing out to others. So perhaps that's within their scope, here, pointed the other way. Or maybe the Hobbit business was just meant to be disarming, to buy uncriticized wiggle-room for their more aggressively targeted marks outside the progressive-sphere.
No.
Correct.
What were you expecting, an announcement that said, "Alert: We have no idea what to tell you to do, since we have no idea what just happened or what will happen next, who is involved, or the scope of the situation!" ?
Or perhaps: "Alert! Complex conflict with Jihaddist Wackadoos now coming to a head, since they're supporting and harboring the people who launched this attack! We can't tell you a thing to do except watch the news, because it's not the sort of emergency that lends itself to any specific instructions other than to avoid the Pentagon parking lot and Lower Manhattan, not that you could get near them anyway right now."
9/11 wasn't the least sort of situation that the EAS is meant to handle.It's meant to break into something you're already watching, and to pass along specific information. On 9/11, pretty much everything you were already watching was already diverted to news coverage, in real time.
You're missing the point. Conservatves aren't afraid to say that they start and run businesses in order to make money. They're proud of creating prosperity. The lefties, on the other hand, do the same stuff, but piously avoid talking about it, and look for cover under the auspicies of the sort of malarky that Gore dishes out. In that camp, it's not cool to want to create wealth. It's only cool to pander to people who fail to grasp that the prosperity pie is not of a fixed size, and to do what those ignoramouses want: let someone else create prosperity, and then use the excuse that they are Eeeeevil for having done so, and then take it away, to temporarily have for themselves, until it runs out and they have to go looking for someone else to villify and loot.
The it's-all-and-only-AGW crowd figures that they've found the magic all-purpose cover mechanism, since they know it will take decades for people to figure out that all of the breathless hyperbole was far more BS than anything else.
The complaint, here, is about people who won't say "Yay! Free market!" out loud, but who then try to create nonsense markets (see: Gore, carbon funny-money, etc) in order to do exactly the same while playing St. Green Guy to avoid criticism from those who hate extremely rich people (like Gore, Moore, et al). Conservatives who point out the Faux-Green-Huckster cash grab aren't being hypocritical, they're pointing out hypocrisy on a grand scale. It was sleazy when the Catholic Church sold get-into-heaven indulgences, and it's sleazy when Al Gore does the modern equivalent, using hurricane-emitting-smokestacks as his modern version of Hieronymus Bosch paintings.
You're (deliberately, one has to assume) pretending to completely miss the point. Who cares how much money construction or fuel companies make? Al Gore is out to make his own money and to enrich his investors (you know, those Eeeeevil 1% people who have money invest in things, and got that way by investing in things). The only thing that matters to him is that his hyperbolic bluster about the end of civilization coming if we don't immediately start to trade phony carbon credits through his shell companies or favor trade with the companies he's got his own money in, and which he's used to talk Democrats into lending taxpayers' cash to questionable crony companies, works. For him. Period.
The only thing left to argue about is how much do we contribute... 80%? 50%?
Really? That's how little you understand the big picture? And you really think that if the number is 10%, or 50%, or 90% it makes no difference?
Regardless, the "denialists" you're loving to hate actually do want to know the number, because people like Al Gore and his large AGW money-handling machine say that human activity is the cause of climate change. Period. And people like him propose the re-arranging of trillions of dollars and government growth in power and intrusiveness (in a way that, gosh, just happens to line up nicely with what generally lefty activists and politicians have always wanted to have happen - how convenient!) as the cure for the 100% AGW that they're preaching.
You think there's nothing left but to settle on a number, just for sake of having it written down someplace? The people who want to cripple economies (just some economies, of course, but not poor, third-world, developing economies like China's) to atone for what they say is 100% man-made, are the people you should be keeping an eye on. They are in it for one thing only, which is why they set up all sorts of money-making entities poised to capitalize on politicians' urges to be seen "doing something." Something, of course, that - mysteriously - never seems to touch on the actual issue (too many people feverishly reproducing in places where they still do things like scrape rainforests down to the ground to get one season's wood and cowpasture, and build a new coal-fired power plant every week to keep up with population growth).
The people you sniffingly dismiss on this topic are looking at what other people, who claimed years ago to have this entirely figured out, numbers and causality and degree be damned, and who want to leverage the situation to get the cash and power. No surprise. Pictures of hurricanes coming out of smokestacks have obviously worked on you.
You should really consider a different way to try to explain away stuff that's documented by all sorts of people. Which part is it that you think is fabricated, exactly, or incorrect? I see.
The most frequently posted opinions on slashdot are far to the right of 99% of the world.
Other than the fact that that's just obvioulsy wrong on the face of it, the real issue is that lefty people who don't like to come right out and say what they think (that productive, creative people should be slaves to people who are not or don't want to bother being so) don't make substantive comments here because those comments are so easily refuted. Instead, they just down-mod what they consider to be too-conservative or libertarian-minded comments, and trot out completely BS statisics in an attempt to persuade non-critical-thinking products of the Nanny State to give them their tepid moral support.
Zombies don't defecate on police cars, or store propane, serve food (but not to poor people!) on property where they don't even have a permit to hold the large assemblies that any other group would be fined for holding.
Also, Zombies have a coherent, identifiable purpose beyond simply whining when the cameras show up, if they're not too busy enforcing their own "no-snitch" rules while having under-age girls and drugs in their tents.
What you are (deliberately, because there's no other possible explanation) missing is that even if 90% of scientists say they think that there is such a thing as AGW, they are not all saying - unlike Al Gore and his merry band of hucksters, investors, and money-handlers - that it (AGW) is the only thing impacting climate, or even necessarily a prominent factor, or anything that can be actually altered by the sort of tax-related and redistributionist agenda that so many preach as a solution. You are (deliberately) pretending that the consensus you cite is a consensus on topics about which 90% of scientists sure as hell do not agree or even responsibly offer an opinion.
Your own post shows how much you think of this topic in idealogical and political power terms, rather than in scientific terms. Which is what this topic - in any way that really matters - is actually all about for the leftists that have latched onto it as one of their favorite new bang-the-drums-in-the-street distraction theater topics. Grabbing cash, power, and political leverage to support the goals of the people we see lining up behind the it's-all-AGW and AGW-is-all-from-Eeeeeevil-businesses mantra, that's what's on display here. And you're doing your assignment just as you've been taught.
Until the consequences reach such catastrophic, region-depopulating proportions that the changes
You mean, like the catastrophic, region-depopulating events, shifts, trends, changes, and whatnot that have happened for millions of years, and which have certainly happened in very obvious ways over the last few thousands of years without any modern-flavored emissions to complicate matters? That sort of thing? We don't need to wait for that to happen, it has happened countless times before, in spots big and small and huge all over the world. It will continue to happen even after the people stomping their feet and insiting that only human activity impacts the climate have died and been replaced by their hopefully more sensible decendents.
By then it'll almost certainly be too late to do anything
Yes, just as it's much too late to do anything about the Sahara, which used to be lush and green and supported populations that it no longer does, and which it ceased to do long before anyone drove an SUV full of people to a protest march or a soccer game.
What you're suggesting is mathematically impossible for anymore than 1% of the population.
So what? The whiny people who keep trotting out that phrase aren't actually talking about "1%" of the population anyway. It's code for "people who've made more than I have, and who I therefore resent." If they got their wish and did topple the Eeeeeevil Businesses and all of the people who've created them, invested in them, and made money in transacting sales of shares of those businesses as more people (um, like labor union pension funds) seek to also own a part of them, then ... great. Those really wealthy people would be gone, right? And then there would be a new 1% to hate, envy, and destroy.
The people marching to that "99%" rubbish are just using code words. So when someone says to them, "just be 1% yourself," they mean exactly what you know they mean: do the things that successful people do so you can quit resenting them for having the discipline, attracting investment, and all of the other things that you don't have to be a member of an Eeeeeeevil Sercret Society to do. It's not about 1% or 5%. The only % that really matters are the 50% of people in this country that don't even pay incometaxes, but who are screaming about other people needing to "pay their fair share." The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren't so toxic.
a few people that had their businesses yanked out of under them because the bank wanted their money back before term
Which is a direct breach of a contract, and a slam dunk in court. But of course it's not because you're either simply BS-ing to score points, or you're deliberately not telling the whole story, and you know it.
So what you're saying is that the middle class is "waging war" against poor people? That poor people remain poor because the middle class is taking their money?
You keep saying "99%," but I don't think you're actually able to do math. Which may explain much of your perspective, actually.
Regardless, why aren't you complaining about the wildly more than 1% of the population that actually owns the large companies about which you're complaining? Why aren't you complaining about your 100% of fellow voters who are the sole source of political power in countries that actually have constitutionally governed elections?
The Arab Spring you're praising appears to be a pretty grim affair indeed. Places like Tunisia are using the changed circumstances to put medieval-minded Islamists into power. The people now running Lybia are assuring us all that Sharia Law will govern everyone's lives in that country. Yay! Is that the 99% you support everywhere? Really? Do you even know what it is you're praising?
I was particularly amused to read about the "occupy" people in NYC whose cooks/chefs are going on strike (and only served a course of peanut butter sandwiches for one meal) to protest against the crowd of people there eating their food without being sufficiently in lock-step with their undefineable agenda. Down With The Man! The Little Guy Should Have Everything! Um, Except For You, Mister, No Food For You Until You Say What We Tell You To Say!
Your 99% is every bit as stratified internally as is the larger world that they're whining about. They're enforcing "no snitch" rules in their mobs and frantically spin-managing reporters in order to pretend it's not so, but the moral hollowness of their whole rudderless rant is staring to really show through, now that most of the well-meaning, rational people have realized what silliness it all is, and have gone home.
Arab protests didn't "embolden" airline workers. Transportation industry workers are famous for striking, do it all the time, and are frequently tone-deaf, even after all these years, about how their actions are received. This isn't any more "new" than are unfocused groups of professional/slacker protesters banging drums in the street and complaining about the inadequacy of the Nanny State. It's the usual group of people, saying the usual internally-contradictory and short-sighted things, with the usual expected result of making people who actually create the jobs these idiots are "demanding" roll their eyes and shake their heads. As most people are doing.
But what were the Mayans saying about how this would impact the global confusion over the difference between itsand it's? Will that finally get straightened out? It might be worth having the universe end if it would put an end to that problem. That, and the end of people using loose when they mean lose. I'm all for the apocalypse if I never again have to read a forum thread in which theoretically academic people talk about how the wrong sort of science and public relations can cause a program to loose it's funding.
Really? You're so obsessed with him that despite everything else going on the world, and billions of poeple about whom you could make some joke, you see a story like this, and the first thing you do is go digging through your one-track, Bush-hatred mind and give this a go? Really?
You can relax. He's not running for president. The guy who thinks there are such things as transcontinental railroads, 57 US states, and similar things (which, if W had said them, would have sent you into a shuddering orgasm of Bush Derangement Syndrome poison-spouting), is running for re-election, though. Why not update your lame repertoire? 2012 is almost here. Maybe you could try on some racist Cain jokes, or fixate on Romney's hair in order to show how cool you are.
Grow up.
do people like you *really* misunderstand the situation this badly
No, I've got it just fine. People chanting about toppling businesses, tearing down banks, doing away with capital and investment as a way to launch and finance businesses, stamping their feet and defecating on police cars while complaining that rich people (who pay almost all of the country's income taxes, and who if taxed at 100% of their income would barely put a dent in the budget deficit) aren't paying their "fair share" ... all of that crap is coming through loud and clear - it's impossible to miss.
What I'm hearing is greed. Greed to have more stuff, taken from the minority of the people who actually pay income taxes, and given out by the government to the majority, who pay little or (in the case of roughly 50% of the population) pay no income taxes at all. What's that about "fair share?"
The latest greed from that camp is the fad for demanding that some clown's $150,000 debt for going to Harvard should be paid for by everyone but him, including a piece of every day's work (in the form of taxes) taken from a guy who understood basic math and opted to take advantage of his local community college, instead, and save six figures in absurd expenses.
I'm seeing greed in the form of demands for "social justice" in the form of everyone getting the same stuff, whether or not they bother to work, and whether or not they have the drive to work two, or three jobs, or risk everything to start a business. Pure greed, born of an enttitlement mindset, and just as doomed to fail as every other urge in that direction has failed everywhere it is applied as policy.
You don't like the fact that the Obama administration hasn't managed to find some basis for criminal prosecution of what you clearly understand to be plain-as-day-details of crimes on the part of some particular investment bankkers? They why aren't you calling for protests in front of the White House, or in front of the offices of the congressional representatives and senators that give that administration their support?
Or, we could sit back and wait for the Chinese to do the innovation and use their manufacturing prowess to sell us cheap electric cars.
Which is exactly how it turned out with solar panels, except the Obama administration put half a billion tax dollars on a bonfire in the Solyndra parking lots so we could be warm while we watched it happen. Of course, they rigged that financing situation so that a handful of private investors would get paid back before the taxpayers ... private investors who happened to be friends of and fundraisers for the Obama campaign. Classy, huh?
Let private companies attract private fundraising for this sort of thing. And let only those people lose out if it's a waste. And if it's successful, let them be rich for having been smart about it (though being smart, and reaping those rewards is now an Eeeeeevil 1% thing to do - and we can't have that now, can we).
The DOE loan is for the Nina
No. Taxpayer money was put at risk for the benefit of a company in Finland. If the product and the company were plainly viable, there would be far more than the half billion dollars in US tax money racing to them from private investors all over the world.
This is an Obama administration fashion statement for rich lefties, and an ass-kiss aimed at socialist Scandinavia so they'll say one or two less sneering things about the US once in a while. The car is more or less pointless, the price tag is absurd, the impact on the economy is inconsequential, but the overall pattern is very telling.
There is no mandate. There is the power, as needed, to do so. Of couse, you know that, and you're just trolling for the fun of it.
I look at the relative stability of Libya before and with Gaddafi
That would be the same stable Libya in which they're finding mass graves full of people he killed off in order to keep down any challenges to his rule? The stability he said he was going to maintain by slaughtering eveyone in several villages/towns/cities because the people resisting him had managed to move into and through those places? Your idea of stability is pretty toxic.